Over a year ago we got the idea to internally send social media alerts for important Sunlight news and project launches. These email alerts consist of a collection of links to sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn that help our staff promote important news with just a couple clicks of the mouse.

It’s quite simple: depending on the service, the link will populate a message that Sunlighter can share making it easy to post important information quickly.

Here’s what those links might look like if I wanted to promote this blog post:

• Share on Twitter
• Post to Facebook
• Share on LinkedIn
• Like on StumbleUpon
• Bookmark on Delicious

The url is populate with the required parameters and a link to the actual post, take a look:

• Share on Twitter – https://twitter.com/intent
  /tweet?text=RT+%40sunfoundation+Tools+for+Transparency%3A
  +Social+Media+Alerts+https%3A%2F%2Fbitly.com%2FpLPJQh+%23gov20+%23opengov
• Post to Facebook – http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fsunlightfoundation.com/blog/2011/07/14/tools-for-transparency-social-media-alerts
• Share on LinkedIn – http://www.linkedin.com/shareArticle?mini=true&url=http%3A//sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2011/07/14/tools-for-transparency-social-media-alerts
• Like on StumbleUpon – http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/8AKY4R/sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2011/07/14/tools-for-transparency-social-media-alerts
• Bookmark on Delicious – http://delicious.com/save?url=http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2011/07/14/tools-for-transparency-social-media-alerts

This is by no means a comprehensive list of social media services and we often add other services, like Reddit or YouTube, while removing others. While participation is opt-in, it still helps us effectively promote Sunlight events.  What do you think? Do you have any ideas or tweaks we might use?